Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer. <i>Cervantes the Poet: The Don Quijote, Poetic Practice, and the Conception of the First Modern Novel</i>

This lively, well-researched book casts new light on what Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer maintains is a little-studied but influential aspect of Cervantes’ career: his development as a poet in the 1560s and the 1570s. Cervantes the Poet makes the case that Don Quijote emerged organically, not from epic (as critics such as Bakhtin famously argued) or from books of chivalry, but from a mid-sixteenth-century poetic culture dominated by Petrarchan lyric utterance and prosimetric pastoral fiction. For Ponce-Hegenauer, this culture furnished the basis for Cervantes’ experiments in novelistic discourse, deploying language “as the site of articulation” at which “the intimate lyric interior attempts to become legible within the socialized history of a human life” (2). This process in turn opened the way for what she presents as Cervantes’ most significant modern intervention: a protagonist in a constant dialectic with a madness that exists on a continuum with Petrarchan subjectivity.This protagonist is not simply or solely don Quijote (“dQ”). Rather, it is an Alonso Quijano (“AQ”) who navigates the world around him in the manner postmodern theorists will subsequently describe as the split subject: the person who, animated by erotic desire, variously invents, lays claim to, finds himself barred from, and discovers anew his idealized imago, “don Quijote.” (Psychoanalysis is implicit here, but Ponce-Hegenauer’s discussions foreground Foucault and Derrida more than they do Lacan.) Ponce-Hegenauer is not only concerned with fictional characters, however. Cervantes the Poet is interested, as she explains in her introduction, in “AQ, a modern author, the author of dQ” and “the poet who made him, Miguel de Cervantes” (2). Key to the latter project is an analysis of the literary culture of Cervantes’ youth.This is a layered set of claims, and Ponce-Hegenauer argues them convincingly, deploying original and refreshing archival research to contextualize thoughtful close readings of a wide range of poetry, pastoral fictions, and theoretical texts. Chapters 1 and 2 situate Cervantes’s early writing in the court of Isabel de Valois, queen of Spain from 1559–1568. Ponce-Hegenauer brings this world to life with recourse to an anonymous diary, Mémoire pour la reine, which appears to date from that time. The document portrays Isabel as an avid devotee of bucolic entertainments, and Ponce-Hegenauer moves easily between its historical vignettes and her thesis that the mimetic play on display at court informed Cervantes’ techniques of shaping literary characters in Don Quijote. Chapter 2 discusses the uses and connotations of specific verse forms within mixed-genre pastoral texts. This topic is often overlooked in criticism (although less so in criticism from Spain and Latin America). It is welcome here, as it adds depth to Ponce-Hegenauer’s arguments about Renaissance poetics. Chapter 3 establishes a through-line between the Petrarchan poetics of Jorge de Montemayor’s La Diana (1559) and Cervantes’ literary techniques in Don Quijote. What draws them together is a lyric device Ponce-Hegenauer introduces here as the “figura of the poet” (she uses italics for this and other key terms throughout the book). This figure will go on to play an important role through the remaining chapters. It interweaves, “the infinity of erotic affect, acts of poiesis, and literary immortality” (85), via a poetic technique which, if it is not invented by, then is certainly permanently associated with, Petrarch. Famously, in the Canzoniere, Francesco Petrarca created an eternal name for himself by devising a 366-poem lyric sequence animated by sublimated erotic desire. Mid- and late-twentieth-century critics analyzed the poetic and linguistic mechanisms by which the rime sparse intersects with both the liturgical calendar and mundane, lived events of Petrarch’s day. Ponce-Hegenauer continues in this tradition and makes compelling use of it as she argues for the significance to the novel genre of a Petrarchan temporality that “overflows the bounds of historical time whilst retaining the traces of historical particularity” (84). Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers were captivated by Petrarch’s techniques and imitated them widely and avidly. Moreover, the cultural relevance of sempiternal temporality was enhanced, as Ponce-Hegenauer points out, by rapid dissemination of moveable type in the fifteenth century.Subsequent chapters discuss lyric culture, the figura of the poet, and the incipient stirrings of novelistic discourse in distinct, relevant contexts. Chapter 4 centers on Cervantes’ literary production during his sojourn in Italy and his travels in the Mediterranean. This approach allows Ponce-Hegenauer to discuss female poets and humanists active in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century. It also opens way for her discussion of Cervantes’ Mediterranean as a space of intersection for Islamic and Christian discourses and motifs. Chapter 5 examines what Ponce-Hegenauer describes as the changed climate for court writing in the wake of the death of Isabel de Valois. Cervantes’ old circles at court disbanded, and authors began to write more frequently for pay, sharing work and ideas in academies and other venues that sprang up throughout Madrid. Here, Ponce-Hegenauer introduces such works as Arcadia of Lope de Vega (1598) and paratextual material included in printings and reprintings of texts from La Diana (1559) through La Dorotea (1632). Her readings furnish engaging context for her analysis of an emergent novelistic subjectivity in Cervantes’ La Galatea (1585). She continues to discuss La Galatea in Chapter 6. The coda delivers Ponce-Hegenauer’s final case for the lyric underpinnings of the modern novel by reviewing the theoretical points developed over the course of Chapters 1–6.Cervantes the Poet makes notable contributions to a number of fields: Cervantes studies, studies in Renaissance and early-modern culture, literary criticism, and (early-modern) women’s studies. Readers of Calíope might miss a more substantive engagement with Spanish and Hispanic poetics and criticism. I was keen to see Ponce-Hegenauer take up Mercedes Alcalá Galán’s work on Cervantes, poetry, and lyric subjectivity, for example (see Escritura desatada: poéticas de la representación en Cervantes. Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 2009), or Pedro Ruiz Pérez’s essays on Cervantes and Castilian verse forms. Moreover, the proliferation of excellent scholarship and criticism that attended the successive quadricentennials of Don Quijote, the Novelas ejemplares, the Parnaso, and the Persiles includes insightful articles on Cervantes, Castilian verse forms, and Spanish lyric production. Closer work with this corpus might have helped Ponce-Hegenauer nuance some of her claims about the state of scholarship on Cervantes and poetry. I imagine that if prompted, Ponce-Hegenauer might respond that most discussions of Cervantes-as-poet focus on his late-career writing, whereas she is most interested in the pre-Quijote (and pre-Parnaso) period. That would be a reasonable point. When working with a writer who has inspired the overwhelming bibliography Cervantes has, one has to draw the line somewhere.Moreover, Ponce-Hegenauer may have cited more of this work than I detected. My one serious reservation about Cervantes the Poet is the index, which is quite sparse. This book is graced with an abundance of wide-ranging footnotes, but the lack of a helpful finding aid poses barriers to following up on the multitudes of intriguing references and titles Ponce-Hegenauer cites in notes and in her main arguments.Having said that, Cervantes the Poet is an important work of scholarship whose value will endure over time. The book opens evocative new paths into both Don Quijote and Cervantes’ youthful world.